how to programmatically fake a touch event to a UIButton?

Question

I'm writing some unit tests and, because of the nature of this particular app, it's important that I get as high up the UI chain as possible. So, what I'd like to do is programmatically trigger a button-press, as if the user had pressed the button in the GUI .

(Yes, yes -- I could just call the IBAction selector but, again, the nature of this particular app makes it important that I fake the actual button press, such that the IBAction be called from the button, itself.)

What's the preferred method of doing this?

Answer 1

It turns out that

[buttonObj sendActionsForControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside];

got me exactly what I needed, in this case.

EDIT: Don't forget to do this in the main thread, to get results similar to a user-press.

---

For Swift 3:

buttonObj.sendActions(for: .touchUpInside)

Answer 2

An update to this answer for Swift

buttonObj.sendActionsForControlEvents(.TouchUpInside)

EDIT : Updated for Swift 3

buttonObj.sendActions(for: .touchUpInside)

Answer 3

斯威夫特 3：

self.btn.sendActions(for: .touchUpInside)

Answer 4

如果你想做这种测试，你会喜欢 iOS 4 中的 UI 自动化支持。你可以很容易地编写 JavaScript 来模拟按钮按下等，尽管文档（尤其是入门部分）有点稀疏。

Answer 5

In this case, UIButton is derived from UIControl . This works for object derived from UIControl .

I wanted to reuse " UIBarButtonItem " action on specific use case. Here, UIBarButtonItem doesn't offer method sendActionsForControlEvents:

But luckily, UIBarButtonItem has properties for target & action.

 if(notHappy){        
         SEL exit = self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem.action;
         id  world = self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem.target;
         [world performSelector:exit];
 }

Here, rightBarButtonItem is of type UIBarButtonItem .

Answer 6

For Xamarin iOS

btnObj.SendActionForControlEvents(UIControlEvent.TouchUpInside);

Reference

Answer 7

It's handy for people who write Unit Tests without UI Tests ;-)

Swift 5 way to solve it for UIBarButtonItem , which does not have sendAction method like UIButton etc.

extension UIBarButtonItem {
    func sendAction() {
        guard let myTarget = target else { return }
        guard let myAction = action else { return }
        let control: UIControl = UIControl()
        control.sendAction(myAction, to: myTarget, for: nil)
    }
}

And now you can simply:

let action = UIBarButtonItem(title: "title", style: .done, target: self, action: #selector(doSomething))
action.sendAction()

Answer 8

Swift 5:

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    @IBOutlet weak var theTextfield: UITextField!
    @IBOutlet weak var someButton: UIButton!
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        theTextfield.text = "Pwd"
        someButton.sendActions(for: .touchUpInside)
    }

    @IBAction func someButtonTap(_ sender: UIButton) {
        print("button tapped")
    }
}

Answer 9

Swift 4:

self .yourButton(self)